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This will be a week of the administration trumpeting its gay rights record, with Obama appearing Tuesday night at the Democratic National Committee’s annual LGBT Gala in New York. Thursday, the Justice Department is set to release a report detailing all the ways it has broadly interpreted the Supreme Court’s United States v. Windsor decision which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act last year.

The White House will host a meeting Thursday afternoon about the executive order and the report, which will identify Social Security and veterans affairs benefits as the two areas where the federal government has not been able to apply the Windsor decision, according to sources briefed on the plans.

That will come as the anti-gay marriage National Organization for Marriage on Thursday holds its own march from the Capitol to the Supreme Court, followed by a gala dinner at the Willard Hotel.

For LGBT advocates, the executive order is so important that they call it the third leg of the stool of Obama’s revolutionary record on gay rights, along with repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and backing same sex marriage. For Obama and Democrats, it’s a fresh way to try to energize the LGBT community and liberals heading into the midterms.

The White House made the unusual move Monday of announcing that Obama had asked for the order to be drafted, though activists say Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett told them the Justice and Labor departments had vetted a version of the order two years ago. A White House official said the advance notice was due to the “intense interest” in the topic.

“The action would build upon existing protections, which generally prohibit federal contractors and subcontractors from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” the official said. “This is consistent with the president’s views that all Americans, LGBT or not, should be treated with dignity and respect.”

The order would cover 28 million workers overall, and what advocates estimate is one in five LGBT employees nationally.

“This is a signal to the ‘rising electorate’ needed to turn out in midterms (LGBT, African American, Latinos and young people) that there’s a reason to come out and vote,” Winnie Stachelberg, an executive vice president for the Center for American Progress said in an email, “so it’s helpful for sure.”

The delay over the final text is seen by some who’ve been watching developments closely as due to the upcoming Supreme Court’s decision on the Hobby Lobby case, on the religious exemption for businesses to claim leeway from Obamacare’s contraception mandate. If the court were to issue a broad exemption, LGBT advocates worry it could have implications for their community as well, by potentially enabling employers to justify discrimination by saying their religion does not approve of LGBT people.

Activists expect that the White House will wait to issue the executive order until after that decision arrives — expected by the end of the month — and that sexual orientation and gender identity will be written into the existing executive order language about workplace discrimination in a way that addresses the decision.

The White House did not comment on what role Hobby Lobby is playing in officials’ thinking.

Signing the order would fulfill a promise that dates back to Obama’s days as a candidate, but that lingered through the first term and has been tabled since Jarrett told advocates in a 2012 meeting that they’d have to keep waiting until after the re-election campaign.

They’ve kept waiting since then, watching with a what-about-us frustration as the president announced in his State of the Union in January that he’d lead by example and raise the minimum wage for government workers, then in April that he’d lead by example and sign an executive order on pay equity for government contractors — all while repeatedly calling for Congress to pass the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, which would cover much of the same legal ground.